Kachina and the Cross (41 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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Page 198
Still, the need for more Spanish soldiers was obviously felt. Custodian Francisco de Ayeta, who in 1677 was also serving as procurator-general of the New Mexican province, managed to persuade the viceroy to send 50 soldiers, 47 of them convicts, to New Mexico, as well as 1,000 horses. Most of the soldiers actually arrived there, though seven managed to escape en route taking with them several saddles, three harquebuses, and 57 horses. Ayeta and the civil authorities in New Mexico quickly realized that these reinforcements were not sufficient, and Ayeta asked for an additional 50 soldiers. This second request was under advisement by the authorities in New Mexico when the Pueblo Indians revolted.
The latter part of the seventeenth century in New Mexico saw the waxing fortunes of one of the prominent families of the colony. A Mexico City merchant named Tomé Domínguez and his wife, Elena Ramirez de Mendoza, were living in Mexico City in the mid-1620s, the mother's family being from Vera Cruz. Their oldest son, Francisco, was born sometime around 1617, and a second boy, Tomé II or Tomé el Mozo, sometime around or after 1620. The most famous member of the family, Juan, came along probably in 1633 or 1634 (or possibly two or three years earlier since he stated his age differently in various documents). The family apparently moved to New Mexico in the train of Governor Pacheco in 1642 and established themselves in the area around Sandia.
Tomé senior was already an old man when he arrived in New Mexico, over eighty years old if later statements of his age are correct. Tomé died in 1656, at the age of ninety-six, and Elena (who must have been considerably younger than her husband) a few years later. There were also several daughters who married into leading New Mexico families. One of them, Francisca, was the wife of Antonio Márquez, presumably a descendent of the powerful Márquez family that had come with Oñate. The Márquez connection was interesting in that one of the female members of that family, Catalina, married Nicolás de Aguilar, and a cousin of Catalina's was the part-Indian Alonso Catiti of Santo Domingo, who became famous as a native leader in the revolt period. Juan himself married Isabel Durán y Chávez from a prominent colonial family, and his two sons, Baltasar and Juan, were born around 1660 and 1665, respectively.
Francisco, the oldest of the Domínguez sons, was also the one least known. He was a captain in the Zia-Cochiti area who in spite of his blindness and age survived the Pueblo Revolt with his family. However, he apparently died in the El Paso area, probably by the autumn of 1681. Tomé Domínguez de Mendoza II lived on a prosperous estancia south of Isleta. He was serving as lieutenant governor and captain general when López de Mendizábal took office but was removed because of his loyalty to the missionary party, being replaced by his brother Juan. After López was toppled, Tomé el Mozo held a number of important posts in the
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government. He was influential in the attempt by the Santa Fe cabildo to get rid of Governor Miranda. In 1666, Tomé was made interim governor of the province during the absence of Governor Villanueva. Tomé and his family escaped southward when the Rio Abajo area was deserted by the Spaniards and Piro Indians in 1680. For some reason, not totally clear, he refused to join the abortive Otermín expedition of 1681-82 to recover the Pueblo area, an expedition in which Tomé's younger brother Juan served as lieutenant general of cavalry and maestro de campo.
The most influential son of Tomé senior and Elena was Juan Domínguez de Mendoza. Beginning as a young man, Juan became an important military leader among the Spaniards. As a leading estanciero and encomendero, he commanded both Spanish and native Pueblo Indian forces in a number of raids against the Apaches to the east and south of the colony, and the Navajo to the west and north. He was certainly ambitious, so much so that in later years he produced a number of forged documents to impress the Crown and Council of the Indies. Nevertheless, it is clear that Juan was a premier war leader in colonial New Mexico, and one who had won the trust of a number of governors. His wealth and great variety of family connections apparently saved him in spite of an occasional tendency to back the wrong side, as in the López de Mendizábal case.
In 1684 Juan Domínguez de Mendoza was described in a cabildo certification as being
tall . . . black haired, of goodly countenance, somewhat dark in complexion and going gray, has a good mustache, and appears to be about sixty years of age. He has three wounds, all on the left side. The first is in a shoulder blade which was broken at the Pefiol de Acoma and as a result he has a withered shoulder. The second is in his left hand, the whole span of the said hand being cleft. The third is above the knee on the said left side, across the thigh, and he has another wound on the right side of his head. He received these in active wars and this cabildo knows it was in the royal service of His Majesty, serving him at his own cost and expense.
A list of offices that Juan Domínguez de Mendoza held is given in a Certification of Services, at El Paso, October 13, 1683, by former governor Antonio de Otermín. According to this list, Juan had been, among other things, alférez, captain, sargento mayor, maestro de campo, commander, lieutenant general, and alcalde ordinario of the Santa Fe cabildo. What Juan Domínguez de Mendoza desperately wanted, however, was the governorship of New Mexico, and this office continued to elude him. His dream was probably doomed from the beginning, for no New Mexican governor had ever been chosen from a
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provincial family. Nevertheless, with son Baltasar in tow, he was on his way to Spain in 1694, still seeking the governorship, when a shipwreck caused the loss of most of their goods. Juan may have been injured in the wreck, for he was hospitalized in Madrid and shortly died. A year later, Baltasar was still trying to get concessions for himself from the Council of the Indies, including the office of governor of New Mexico or that of alcalde mayor of Sonora. His petition does not seem to have been taken seriously, and Juan's family never returned to New Mexico. In fact, the only male Domínguez de Mendoza who went back to the province after the Pueblo Revolt was José, an illegitimate son of one of the Domínguez family, perhaps Tomé II. This individual was with Vargas's army in 1692 and, as will be related below, helped rescue his sister, who had been made captive at the beginning of the revolt.
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Chapter Twelve
Fateful Decisions
A Pueblo Indian in the year 1680, especially a religious conservative, must have looked back over the previous eight decades as the epitome of disaster. When Oñate rode into Pueblo land with his little army and his crowd of settlers and livestock, he found around fifty thousand Pueblo Indians. There is no certainty about the number of actual
pueblos
that were inhabited, but there could well have been as many or more as in Coronado's time, although the overall population had declined by perhaps ten thousand between 1540 and 1598. And as the seventeenth century went by, Pueblo Indian population continued a drastic downward spiral.
This downturn the Spaniards in 1680 could see only too well and documented in report after report. Father Ayeta, the Franciscan custodian, in 1679 estimated only seventeen thousand natives, six thousand of whom were able ''to use the bow and arrow''in other words, warriors. He listed forty-six Indian towns, but even as he wrote, several of these were in the process of dissolution. In October of 1680 the Santa Fe cabildo, gathering at La Salineta north of modern El Paso, estimated that the total number of Pueblo Indian rebels exceeded sixteen thousand (roughly the same number as Ayeta when the Piros and Southern Tiwas are subtracted). A hundred years after the revolt, Fray Sylvestre Vélez de Escalante made a series of extracts from the remaining seventeenth-century New Mexico archives. In an April 1778 letter to his superior, Fray Juan Agustin de Morfi, Escalante stated that of the forty-six pueblos, seven had been deserted a few years prior to the Pueblo Revolt: Hawikuh in Zuni, Chililí, Tajique, Quarai of the eastern Tiwa, and Abó, Humanas, and Tabirá of the Tompiro.
Whatever the case a few years earlier, in 1680 there seem to have been thirty-two settled towns in the Northern and Southern Tiwa, Tewa, Towa (including Pecos), and Keresan areas. The main Zuni town was at Halona, and as said earlier, this may have been the only occupied pueblo. The Hopi, on the other hand, had
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Mission ruins at Gran Quivira, July 1916 (photo by Jesse L.
Nusbaum, courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 12864)
five well-documented pueblos. There seem to have been four Piro towns still occupied, but one of them, Senecú, had been resettled in late 1677, following its dissolution after an Apache attack almost three years earlier. It is not certain how many of the Tompiro and east-slope Sandia and Manzano Tiwa towns remained, but the whole area was at the point of collapse, and the Tompiro probably had no viable towns at all. Some of the settlements listed, especially in the Towa and Tewa areas, were very small and perhaps seasonal. The decrease was drastic: for every three inhabitants in 1600 there was only one in 1680. There were a number of reasons for the shrinkage, the most important one surely being the recurring sweep of Spanish disease, especially the dreaded smallpox. The modern Taos Indians have a deity called
Kliwa
, "Refuse Wind," who brings smallpox and other epidemics. I rather suspect that this malevolent spirit, though it may be aboriginal, had taken a new direction and new meaning in the seventeenth century.
There have been revisionist arguments (see notes for this chapter) that Pueblo population losses over the seventeenth century have been overstated and that some of the Pueblos actually had more people in 1680 than at mid-century. This assumed post-mid-century population "rebound" is largely undocumented. There is a possibility that it may have been true in selected cases. For example,
Page 203
Picurís might have had a population increase, although this has never been quantified except indirectly. During the historic Trampas period (1600-1696) at Picurís there was a considerable increase in the number of artifacts per cubic foot of trash. The excavators believe that during the seventeenth century, Spanish draft animals, the plow, and irrigation led to the opening of heavy wooded and grass-choked bottomlands impossible to cultivate with more primitive tools. In the relatively high (7,300 feet and higher) and cold Picurís area, there is only a scantily overgrown hillside terrain that was possible to cultivate with Pueblo tools. In this case, opening the bottoms may have dramatically increased the arable land and available food resources. Certainly, during the famine period, 1667-72, Picurís was able to trade ewes, wheat, and maize to the missionaries for distribution to harder-hit areas.
Pecos has also been claimed as having a population increase in the latter half of the seventeenth century. With Pecos, it largely depends on which population figures are chosen. The population at Pecos declined from around two thousand in the early seventeenth century to perhaps twelve hundred to thirteen hundred in López de Mendizábal's time. An estimate by Vetancurt for 1680 gives two thousand people, and Vargas in 1692 gave around fifteen hundred people, both sets of figures seeming to show a total or partial recovery. However, I suspect that Vetancurt's 1680 round figures means that he was borrowing from one or another earlier estimate. De Vargas's estimate for the year 1692 was a very rough one, and it flies in the face of Fray Diego de Zeinos's more detailed count of men, women, and children two years later, which gives a total figure of 738. Assuming that Zeinos made a reasonably correct count in 1694, it suggests thatif we believe Vargas's numbershalf the population of Pecos had fled, or died out, in the two years since the governor's reckoning. The far greater likelihood is that Vargas simply inflated the population.
In any event, a Pueblo Indian population "recovery" must have been very shallow because the overall figures quoted above seem to be reasonably accurate. If population in a few selected pueblos did rebound after mid-century, it may have been due to improved agricultural methods, increased resistance to disease during the latter part of the century, or perhaps a slight rise in the birth rate due to a more stable relationship between the Pueblos and their missionary and secular masters. Let me stress again, however, that the Franciscans, whose head counts were crucial in mission planning, indicated a general decline throughout this eighty-year period of Spanish rule. Franciscan estimates were more apt to err on the high side, and to assume that the friars were systematically under-counting their charges in the seventeenth century makes no sense at all.

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